Pygmalion Unbound (11 page)

“Son of a bitch!” she shouted. “Goddamned sonofabitch bastard motherfucker!” She beat her fists on her thighs, stamped her feet, let loose with a stream of profanity that finally died out after a couple of minutes.

Franklin smiled, keyed the ignition code, and the BMW’s control console came to life. Franklin backed the car out and drove noiselessly out of the lot onto the road.

“Feel better?” he asked bemusedly.

She took a deep breath. “I do. I’m sorry.”

“Forget it. I’ve felt like it ever since I got here.”

“You don’t — ”

“I keep it hidden. All that Black Rage, you know. I can suppress that, I can suppress
anything
.” Franklin laughed again, a signal he was only half serious. “If it’s any consolation, I completely side with you. I think Des is way in over his head on this. He’s only looking at it as a technical problem to be solved. He doesn’t realize that it’s also a moral, ethical, and a legal problem. And a psychological or sociological one too, look at it long enough.”

“You’ve tried to tell him this?”

“Tried to, at the start, but gave up. I want him to succeed — to create a whole army of Marias.”

“Why?” Kelly turned in her seat to look at Franklin as he guided the car from the lot. “You’ve a puzzle. You’re not the arrogant scientist type, doing something because you can, never asking if you should. You’re not out to play God. Tell me exactly what’s in this for you,” she asked.

Franklin guided the car out of the lot, onto the lonely road leading to Denver. “It’s about power, Doctor, just like anything else. I’m playing Des’s game, but for my own reasons. I’ve been doing that since I was a kid. No one gave a damn when my house down in Biloxi got blown away by Katrina. Wiped us out, we had to move in with some relatives in Kansas City. No one noticed a refugee kid, not if he was black and talked with a watermelon nigger accent. Least, not until they found I had a wicked skyhook shot and could nail a three-pointer ten feet past the line.
Then
they noticed. Got me through school on a scholarship to KU. Got me this,” he lifted his hand, showed her a gold ring. “NCAA Championship, 2008. I was a freshman. Might’ve gotten me millions if I turned pro, but I was done with the minstrel show. I told the NBA to stuff it, got into MIT and got my degree in computer science. Hoops woulda made me a washed-out celebrity with bad knees by thirty. I’m forty now and I’m gonna have a Nobel medal to go along with this.”

He slowed as the car approached the guard shack. The barrier lifted, and the guard waved him through. Franklin maneuvered onto the highway back to Denver.

“You’re as crazy as he is,” Kelly said.

Franklin laughed. “Might sound like it, Doctor. But think what we’re doing. Creating a new race. Maybe the race that replaces us.”

“Replaces — ”

“Think big for a moment. Sure, we got through the twentieth century without wiping out all life in a nuclear war. But that didn’t cure the basic human impulse. Instead of one big bad guy, the Russians, we got a bunch of little bad guys. They’re a hell of a lot harder to handle, ’cause they got nothing to lose. The Russians woulda lost an industrial economy and a modern standard of living if they were nuked, literally bombed back into the Stone Age. But the goatherder in Trashcanistan who stones his woman to death if she ditches her burqua? Hell, he’s
still living
in the Stone Age, at best. Dropping a few nukes on them won’t do shit for deterrence. So the head motherfucker in charge of Trashcanistan who gets hold of a few nukes or — better yet — some kind of really nasty bioengineered virus like anthrax or ebola, he’s got nothing to lose. Once the warheads start going off, it don’t matter what’s in ’em. You won’t be able to stop it.”

“That’s not like the Soviets dropping a few thousand bombs on us — ”

“Oh, no? Think about our world, Doctor. It’s a lot more interconnected. How much of our economy is wired into the net or the grid? A few good EMPs, and every single bank record is gone. Stock transactions, gone. Transportation of goods halts, ’cause all the computer chips that run cars and planes and trains and trucks are fried. The factories to make new ones are shut down for the same reason. Might get it up again in a couple of years, but what’s gonna be left? Take away that thin veneer of civilization, doctor, take away any controls, any sense that the government has control, that it’s watching you, and throw in starvation and no electricity to boot — I saw that firsthand after Katrina. Imagine the world as one big ‘Dome. Now figure that there ain’t no Guard comin,
ever
, multiply it by a million. At some point the rioting and destruction will make it impossible to recover, at least not in one lifetime. Humanity, if it’s not killed outright, will start to decline. Whether it’s a bug or bombs, the result is the same.”

Kelly sat silently for a moment. “Suddenly being fired doesn’t seem so bad,” she said with a grim smile.

“I know. But it’s coming. History says it’s
got
to. Every climax species, from the dinosaurs on down, has gotten its comeuppance at some point. Used to think we could save ourselves by starting space colonies. That’s not happening. It’s been over fifty years since man last walked on the moon. So this is Plan B.”

“And you’re going to be — what? Are they programmed to worship you?”

“I’m not playing God. I’m playing Moses.”

Kelly recoiled. “You’re insane.”

“I’m perfectly sane, Doctor. Armageddon happens, who do you want in charge? The same idiots who got us into this mess, if they’re alive? Some warlords who survive because they have the biggest guns? Or me? Or even you? With an army of Marias behind us?”

“I — I — how do you even know it’ll work?”

“There’s a master program in Maria, that’s in the templates for all future droids. Something Des doesn’t know about. It’s a survival directory. In an emergency it essentially disregards all the Asimov laws.”

“That’s what kicked in during the field test,” Kelly said.

“Yep. And it worked perfectly, I might add.”

“So they ignore humans?”

“Not completely,” Franklin shook his head. The rain began coming down harder now, the windows began fogging. “You were right. Those laws were written for mechanical robots. We’ve created new life, human life. My alteration doesn’t make the droids sacrifice themselves for a human automatically. They can choose to let a human perish. Or they can actively take a human life, if theirs is threatened.”

“To what end?”

“Maria’s programmed with dormant nanotechnology inside her. Every so often, the nanos are programmed to activate, and synthesize telomerase.”

Something on a science website tickled her backbrain. “Anti-aging?”

“Right. Every time cells are replaced, the telomere chain is shorter. That’s what causes aging. Telomerase was developed in the 1980s, as a way to prevent that shrinkage. They did trials on lab rats back in the teens, haven’t gotten around to human trials yet. Officially, it’s still experimental, the FDA and NAS and the CDC and the whole alphabet soup are mum on it. But Maria has it. And the other droids will, too. When humanity is up the proverbial fecal creek without a means of propulsion, Maria will be there. For a long time, as long as it take to dig out of the new Dark Ages.”

“My God,” Kelly said, her head spinning, leaning back in the seat. “Why hasn’t this been tried on humans?”

“You want people to start riots thinking the government’s got a Fountain of Youth they’re holding back?” Franklin said. “It’ll take a decade at least before it’s ready for widespread use. Haven’t got all the bugs worked out yet, but Des figured no one would care much if the treatment backfired on a droid, rather than someone’s grandma.”

“So she’s immortal?”

“In theory. We haven’t tested it that far yet. But the end is clear. The problem with humans is that we’re an eternal soul trapped inside a piece of biological machinery that has a maximum operational life of a hundred years at best, but is subject to all sorts of malfunctions that can cut that short. All that experience and wisdom lost, no way to preserve it.”

“So they become preservers of civilization. Kind of like the Irish monks after the fall of Rome, who hid out in Skellig Michael copying ancient texts, and sending forth missionaries when things settle down.”

“Exactly. And here’s something else. I’ve put in a file on human biology and reproduction in the memory. After a certain period, if no human life forms are encountered, then the droids are directed to a location here at the AC complex where we’ve stored human DNA and the equipment needed to start a new race.”

Kelly stared at him, openmouthed. “You mean a Noah’s Ark? A genetic library?”

“Right. I’ve all contributed to it. You can, if you want to. You’ve got excellent genes.”

“I — I’ll think about it.”

“Good.”

They rode the rest of the way in silence, arriving at her house as raindrops began falling.

14

< Standby mode initiate > 20:00:00 04272027 diagnostic run

< system interrupt > 01:27:55 04282027

< what is my purpose >…file not available

< where did i come from >…file not available

< who am i >…file not available

< what am i > CLASSIFIED ACCESS DENIED

< OVERRIDE ACCESS CODE 0987 PASSWORD RONI >

< biological android derived from human genetic material with enhancements >

< whose material? >…

< file not available at this location >

< access mainframe >

< not available this terminal >

< working > secure access

< working > access granted

The door was easier to open than she had imagined. She took a length of cable from the small CPU set on a small table in one corner of the room; it had standard light-speed USB ports, which fitted into the jack at her temple. The other end went into the small keypad by the door. Two seconds later, the door slid open with a hiss. She put on the fatigues and tac boots, and walked out into the hallway.

The hallways were dimly lit by the red glow of EXIT signs, but her night vision let her find Crane’s office on another wing of the building, three doors that needed to be hacked and opened with ease. From his terminal she could access the AC mainframe; she sat in his chair; his scent still on the fabric triggered a memory deeply buried. She placed the end of the USB cable into the CPU, closed her eyes —

15

She hadn’t actually been terminated, Kelly found out, but had been placed on administrative leave pending a full review of the program. Which meant that her access to the American Cybernetics facility had been temporarily suspended. She was sure that it had been reported back to the university, so she called Kaplan.

It was a measure of her paranoia that she drove to a mall and bought a new cell phone with six hours of prepaid time, with cash. She’d had to turn over her cell phone the first few times she’d gone to work, and there was every possibility in her mind that the phone had been whisked away to some basement lab for implantation of a bug that let AC listen to all of her conversations.

She dialed Kaplan’s number in the early afternoon, after she bid Franklin farewell. Kaplan was, as normal, in his office. It was near mid-term exam time, so he was either writing or grading tests. She explained the problem to him, and he listened, peppering her with questions. At the end of her tale, there was silence on the other end of the line.

“Fred?”

“Hmm? My God, Lana, if this is right, you’re sitting on the scientific revolution of the millennium. Artificial people, right from a vat. Apparently no more difficult than baking a cake. And immortal, too.”

“It’s a little harder than that, Fred,” she chided him. “The problem isn’t the process.”

“It’s the result. This Crane, he doesn’t see them as people. It’s just a
golem
to him.”

“Yeah, but it’s no legend,” Kelly said. “And didn’t the
golem
turn on its creator?”

“It did. A rabbi ben Bazalel is supposed to have created one in Prague in the 1600s, to protect the Jews from the Holy Roman Emperor, but it later turned violent and began killing Jews. You activate one by writing the Hebrew word for ‘truth’ on its forehead, and deactivate it by removing the letter aleph, making the word ‘death.’ He rubbed out the aleph, and the thing is supposedly still stored in the attic of his temple.”